An 'Apartments for Rent' sign from a property management company on a brick building on W Pratt Blvd in Rogers Park, Chicago

How Chicago should regulate rental junk fees

October 9, 2026 / / 1 Comment

This post was co-written with Steffany Bahamon.

Chicago is going to regulate rental fees no matter which renter protection ordinance City Council passes. Both the mayor’s Protecting Renters Ordinance (PRO) and the alternative introduced by Ald. Gilbert Villegas (FAIR) write new fee rules, and both sit on top of the same new state law. The question isn’t whether Chicago should regulate junk fees; it’s how the list of allowed fees works, whether landlords have to show their costs, and what happens to move-in fees.

Abundant Housing Illinois (AHIL) supports PRO’s fee structure with two changes: let tenants choose between a security deposit and move-in/move-out fees (never both), and replace fixed dollar caps with a “reasonable documented cost” standard. This is the companion to last week’s post on what Chicago’s rental registry should collect and how to pay for it. (These memos are posted here because the AHIL website is presently being transferred to a new system.)

What state law already does

HB 3564, passed in May 2026, added fee rules to the Illinois Landlord and Tenant Act, effective January 1, 2027. Every non-optional fee has to be disclosed on the first page of the lease, application fees are capped at $50 (a landlord can bill a higher third-party screening cost only with a receipt, within 14 days), and landlords can’t rename a fee to get around the rules. Springfield deliberately left move-in fees and security deposits to local governments, which is where PRO and FAIR come in.

PRO and FAIR take opposite approaches

PRO says a tenant can be charged a security deposit, up to one month of prepaid rent, and a specific list of allowed fees. Everything else is out. FAIR does the reverse: it bans specific practices and permits the rest.

FAIRPRO
StructureBans listed practices, permits the restOnly listed fees are allowed (an “allow list”)
Application fee$50, with documented overage billable (state law)The lesser of the actual cost or $20
Move-in/move-out feesMove-in fee allowed if reasonably related to estimated costNot on the list, which means they’re banned
Security deposit cap1.5 months’ rent1 month’s rent
Proof of costFirst-page disclosure onlyItemized cost and documentation before charging
Routine maintenance (like repainting units, replacing worn fixtures, vacuuming)Barred only in pet chargesBarred from every fee
Utilities and RUBSNo markupNo markup building-wide, no billing-vendor fees, a written formula showing how utility bills are divided among apartments, 90 days’ notice of changes, bills on request

FAIR has a no-rename clause, but it only catches relabeling an existing fee, not inventing a new one. Under a “ban list” approach, a landlord who comes up with a fee nobody thought to ban gets to keep charging it.

An allow list is a typical policy

PRO’s approach isn’t radical. It’s similar to what many other places already do:

  • Seattle updated its rental fee rules in August 2026. A fee is legal only if city code or state law authorizes it, regardless of what it’s called. Seattle is stricter than PRO: no pet fees beyond a damage deposit, a flat $10 late fee, and no fees for paying by check or ACH.
  • Montgomery County, Maryland permits only an enumerated set of regulated fees.
  • Colorado bars fees above the landlord’s actual cost and requires a disclosed utility formula.

Utility billing rules

A ratio utility billing system (RUBS) splits a master-metered building’s utility bill across units by formula, usually based on apartment size and number of occupants (the assumption being that households of similar size use similar amounts of energy). Both ordinances keep RUBS legal. FAIR has one rule: no markups. PRO puts guardrails around it:

  • No markup across the building. The total charged to all tenants can’t exceed what the utilities billed.
  • No billing-vendor fees. Tenants can’t be charged costs from third-party vendors, aggregators, or resellers.
  • No switching mid-lease. A landlord can’t move a tenant from landlord-paid to tenant-paid utilities, or from fixed-rate to variable-rate, during the lease.
  • 90 days’ notice before any such change.
  • A written formula detailed enough for tenants to calculate their own share, keyed to the Tenant Utility Payment Disclosure Act.
  • Bills on request for any period a tenant is charged for.

That’s Seattle’s current position, and close to Oregon’s statewide rules. We support PRO’s approach to utilities as written.

Change 1: a deposit or move-in/move-out fees, never both

A common problem with junk fees is stacking: a move-in fee, an application charge, and a monthly “bundle” fee piled on top of base rent before anyone has moved in. PRO fixes this by banning move-in and move-out fees outright and capping deposits at one month’s rent.

We’d rather let tenants choose one track or the other. The landlord prices both up front, and the renter picks at signing:

  • Deposit track: a refundable security deposit of up to one and a half months’ rent (FAIR’s level), held and returned under the city’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Ordinance.
  • Fee track: move-in and/or move-out fees at reasonable documented cost, with a combined total of no more than one and a half months’ rent, and no deposit.

A move-in fee at cost is usually a few hundred dollars, not a month’s rent, so the fee track is a cheaper way into an apartment. The either/or rule ends stacking and should mean fewer fights over deposits.

Seattle caps the security deposit and nonrefundable move-in fees together at one month’s rent but leaves the mix up to the landlord. We’d hand that choice to the tenant. Cook County’s Residential Tenant Landlord Ordinance bars disguising a deposit as a nonrefundable fee, and we’d keep that rule: a fee that works like a deposit gets treated like one. A renter who wants money back picks the deposit; one who’s short on cash picks the fee. Capping the fee at documented cost keeps the cheaper option honest.

Change 2: reasonable documented cost, not fixed dollar caps

A cost standard is preferable because it’s based on real costs, while fixed dollar caps written into the ordinance will go stale. PRO already requires an itemized description, the cost, and supporting documentation before any fee is charged. A fee backed by receipts is easier to audit than a flat number nobody has to justify.

What we mean by “reasonable cost”:

  • What the landlord actually paid; for turnover fees, a documented estimate from recent turnovers of comparable units
  • No routine maintenance, overhead, or profit
  • Itemized and documented before it’s charged

For application fees, we’d use the state framework from HB 3564 instead of PRO’s $20 cap. That gives Illinois one application fee standard instead of two. Evanston and Cook County already use cost-based standards for move-in fees.

The fee schedule AHIL supports

Before move-in, a landlord may collect only:

  • First month’s rent
  • An application fee at actual documented cost, under the state framework (up to the $50 cap in state law, plus documented third-party overage, and free when the tenant provides a reusable screening report)
  • The tenant’s choice of one of the following (the landlord offers both, with prices in writing before signing):
    • a refundable security deposit of up to one and a half months’ rent, or
    • move-in and/or move-out fees at reasonable documented cost, with a combined total of no more than one and a half months’ rent

During the tenancy, only:

  • A pet fee, one-time or recurring but not both, at reasonable cost
  • Non-recurring costs the tenant triggers (key copies, bounced payments), at actual cost
  • Optional services the tenant opts into in writing, at cost
  • Utility charges under PRO’s rules: no markup building-wide, no billing-vendor fees, a written allocation formula, 90 days’ notice of changes, and bills on request

Rules for every fee:

  • Allow list: anything not on this list is prohibited
  • Itemized description, cost, and documentation before charging
  • No routine maintenance in any fee
  • Every non-optional fee on page one of the lease (state law)
  • A fee that works like a deposit is treated as a deposit (meaning it’s returned after the tenant moves out and leaves the unit in the condition previously agreed upon)
  • Charging a prohibited fee draws a penalty from the new rental housing bureau of 1.5 times the amount charged

Who else supports junk fee reform

Junk fee reform has been backed by other YIMBY groups, research organizations, and economists:

  • Open New York backed the FARE Act, New York City’s ban on making tenants pay broker fees for brokers the landlord hired. Executive Director Annemarie Gray said the law will protect renters from thousands of dollars in broker fees they never asked for.
  • Urban Institute recommends upfront disclosure of all fees, banning catch-all cost transfer clauses, banning mandatory services, and allowing evictions only for unpaid rent. Seattle’s council sponsor cited this research when the city unanimously passed its rental junk fee ban in August 2026.
  • Center for American Progress proposes capping rental application fees, noting that landlords typically pay screening companies less than they charge renters, and that portable screening report laws often produce limited savings in practice.
  • Neale Mahoney, a Stanford economist, worked on national junk fee policy in the Biden administration and flew to Seattle to testify for the city’s rental fee ban.

City Council should pass fee rules that list what a landlord can charge, require receipts for every charge, and let renters choose between a deposit and move-in fees instead of paying both. PRO gets most of the way there; with these two changes, Chicago would have one of the clearest fee standards in the country.

courtyard apartment building

What Chicago’s rental registry should collect, and how to pay for it

October 5, 2026 / / 2 Comments

This post was co-written with Steffany Bahamon.

Chicago is going to get a rental registry no matter which renter protection ordinance City Council passes. Both the mayor’s ordinance (PRO) and the alternative introduced by Ald. Gilbert Villegas (FAIR) create one. The question now isn’t whether Chicago should have a registry; it’s what data the registry collects and how we pay for it. (Abundant Housing Illinois has endorsed PRO with some changes; this post goes deeper on the registry, and a companion post covers how Chicago should regulate rental junk fees.)

I’ve been making the case for a rental registry since 2023, when I proposed a kludge using Cook County databases because Chicago Cityscape only has unit-count data for about 37 percent of apartment buildings. 17 of the 75 largest U.S. cities already run one, and the National League of Cities – where Alderman Villegas sits on the board – recommends them as a local policy.

Rental data is notoriously hard to get right, and as YIMBYs we want the best data possible.

FAIR’s registry collects only four things

Under FAIR, a registration “shall include only”:

  1. the street address of the building
  2. owner or agent contact
  3. property manager contact
  4. who receives repair requests

That’s not enough to do much with.

PRO collects much more: the address and PIN (the property index number Cook County uses to identify each parcel), unit count, floor count, unit numbers, bedrooms, whether each unit is occupied or vacant, and the monthly rent charged for each unit. It also collects the full ownership structure: every member or officer holding 20 percent or more (or the top five if nobody hits 20 percent), parent companies, subsidiaries, the trust name and whoever can direct the trustee, and a local contact in Chicago if the owner isn’t here. No P.O. boxes allowed.

PRO leaves it to the Commissioner of Housing to decide, by rule, which registry information is publicly accessible and which is restricted (§5-12-175(b)(1)). In our view it’s not essential to publish owners’ addresses to the public but City Hall should have it.

A major reason to have a registry is that LLCs shield problem landlords and the city and tenants can’t figure out who owns what. FAIR’s registry cannot pierce a single LLC. You’d get a street address and a registered agent, which is what you can already get from the Illinois Secretary of State.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. In September a Cook County judge halted the receivership sale of the Crestwood Apartments, a 57-unit building for low-income seniors at 525 N Austin Boulevard, after tenants linked the buyer to the building’s former operator, The Real Deal reported. That operator, Boruch “Barry” Drillman, pleaded guilty last year to a $165 million federal mortgage fraud conspiracy, and his company is the target of Fannie Mae’s foreclosure lawsuit over the building after it allegedly defaulted on a $5.1 million mortgage. The Chicago Housing Authority had suspended rent subsidies on 31 units over failed inspections and declared the property “uninhabitable.”

Crestwood isn’t a one-off. Brian Mykulyn and Elora Raymond wrote in Shelterforce that the share of rental units owned by non-individual investors rose from 17.3 percent in 2001 to 24.5 percent in 2015. In Memphis, the majority of the most blighted properties belong to LLCs, and in Milwaukee, LLC ownership correlates with housing disrepair. Their recommendation is the one I’m making here: local rental ordinances that require LLCs to disclose who’s behind them, like Minneapolis, which requires rental licensees to name “an associated natural person.”

PRO pays for itself; FAIR’s funding doesn’t exist on paper

PRO charges an annual registration fee of $20 per unit for buildings with 1–4 units, $40 per unit for 5–49 units, and $60 per unit for 50+ units. Chicago Housing Authority units, affordable units under a regulatory agreement, and owner-occupied one- to six-flats are exempt from the fees (but not from registering). That adds up to about $22 million a year, which funds the bureau that administers the registry (§2-44-200(b)(3)). About half of rental registries are funded this way, so it’s not ideal, but it’s normal.

FAIR has no fee provision at all. Its Office of Rental Housing would sit inside the Department of Buildings and is “subject to appropriation” in a department that housing advocates and the Johnson administration both say is already stretched thin.

Alderman Villegas has verbally described funding it through a foreclosure registry. That is not in the FAIR ordinance text. Steffany looked for a city that funds a rental registry with foreclosure registry fees and couldn’t find one anywhere in the United States. Foreclosure and rental registries coexist in plenty of Florida cities, but they’re funded separately, and foreclosure fees are usually dedicated narrowly by statute.

The closest thing is Columbus, Ohio, and even it doesn’t do exactly that. Columbus has a $250 biannual foreclosed property registration and still funded its April 2026 rental registry with a $15 per-unit fee. Columbus also tried to spend registry fees on affordable housing and was told by its own deputy city attorney that state law only lets registry fees pay for the registry.

Foreclosure revenue moves the wrong way

There’s a very good fiscal reason most rental registries aren’t funded this way. Foreclosure revenue is countercyclical and inconsistent: it’s a trickle in good years and spikes during recessions.

A registry for 500,000+ units, on the other hand, is a fixed, permanent cost: vendors, staff, and a public website. In a city where the budget fight is an annual bloodbath, funding data infrastructure with a revenue line that moves the wrong way is how you end up with an unmaintained or half-built database.

Chicago may not be able to fund the FAIR registry that way regardless. In FHFA v. City of Chicago (N.D. Ill. 2013), Judge Durkin held that the city’s vacant buildings ordinance was preempted as to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and called the $500 registration fee an impermissible tax on the federal government. Fannie and Freddie held about 258,000 Chicago loans at the time. The city settled in 2014 and agreed not to collect. We already litigated the foreclosure fee base and lost most of it.

Data the registry should capture

  • Owner identity, including the real people (natural persons) behind LLCs. The current records don’t show who actually owns the building. It allows early intervention (knowing who is behind a portfolio lets the city act before problems spread across many buildings).
  • Property manager and a local 24/7 emergency contact (this is the “responsible party” who will address tenant issues; ownership information is needed to know who’s responsible for the manager and emergency contact)
  • Building and dwelling characteristics
    • Unit count per building
    • Bedroom and bathroom count per unit
  • Existing data about the building from extant sources
    • Eviction records as they happen (this information would be supplied by a data sharing agreement between the city and the Cook County Circuit Court)
    • Inspection and violation history
  • Rental information
    • Rent for each occupied unit (the price on the lease)
    • Terms for each occupied unit
      • move-in month
      • whether the lease is month-to-month, annual, or some other period
      • which utilities are included
      • price of fixed-rate utilities
      • whether RUBS (ratio utility billing, which splits a master-metered building’s utility bill across units by formula) is used
      • whether a security deposit or move-in fee was used, and the price of such
  • Status of each unoccupied unit, as a count with a per-unit breakdown:
    • Leasable, meaning the owner is looking for a tenant
    • Held for a future tenant who won’t be charged rent
    • Held vacant for a planned renovation
    • Whether it’s listed online, and at what price
    • Whether a broker represents it
    • If it isn’t listed, the price the owner is trying to get

Who else supports rental registries

I’m not alone here. Rental registries have been endorsed by other YIMBY groups and research organizations:

City Council should pass a registry that can actually tell us who owns Chicago’s rental housing, what it rents for, and which units are sitting empty – and fund it with a revenue source that will still be there in year three. PRO’s registry comes much closer to that than FAIR’s.

Abundant Housing Illinois statement on BUILD, PRO, and FAIR

September 26, 2026 / / 1 Comment

Abundant Housing Illinois is a pro-housing organization that advocates for abundant housing and sustainable, inclusive cities throughout Illinois. Our website is currently being migrated to a new platform so we shared this statement about the Protecting Renters Ordinance on our Bluesky and now on my blog. (I am one of the leads of Abundant Housing Illinois.)

Abundant Housing Illinois endorsement graphic: If you want cheaper housing, push BUILD. If you want cheaper housing and tenant rights, push BUILD and vote for an amended PRO.

We’re happy to hear that there’s been extensive commentary in City Council and elsewhere in Chicago on housing affordability. Given all this new discussion, we recommend this plan of action for all the aldermen who have correctly bemoaned the city’s top ranking of places where rents have increased the most:

If you’re serious about Chicago’s housing shortage and skyrocketing housing prices, work with us to pass Governor Pritzker’s BUILD plan.

As research from Chicago Community Trust shows, the Chicagoland housing market is regional. As many other states have shown, one of the best mechanisms to address high housing costs locally is to pass laws at the state level. The laws of Illinois and Chicago’s neighboring municipalities that suppress new housing from being built also affect every ward’s housing market. Governor Pritzker understands this.

The BUILD plan is a common sense reform that will allow us to rebuild the neighborhood character of Chicago. The missing middle advocated for in his plan is present already as the beloved 2-to-4 flats in nearly every community area of Chicago. The missing middle bill already has many municipal elected officials against it – nothing is stopping our municipal elected officials for pushing in favor. In other states local elected champions made the difference.

With budget season upon us, there’s one more thing worth stating: housing growth is a revenue strategy. The Chicago Financial Future Task Force’s final report explicitly called out policies echoed in BUILD as revenue generators. The recently passed 21st century ROAD to Housing Act means these reforms could impact federal money for Chicago and other municipalities in Illinois. More housing means more residents, a broader tax base, and more options for Chicagoans already here.

A witness slip takes 3 minutes to fill out, a letter to the editor takes 30, a social media video explainer takes an afternoon. If you’re serious about addressing the housing shortage and helping pass BUILD, we’re happy to help with all the above and more. Your voice as an alder impacts statewide officials – your relationships with representatives outside Chicago are crucial now more than ever.

However, there have been extensive conversations about updating the RLTO that outlines how tenants and housing providers relate to each other across Chicago. As the Chicago and Illinois chapter of YIMBY Action, increasing housing stability is one of our five core policy pillars. It’s not our primary focus but we have a vested interest in the update. Since both ordinances concern mostly housing stability policies, not housing supply policies, we believe that they should be evaluated primarily on those benefits.

After extensive deliberation with members and partners across Chicagoland, including leadership in both the PRO and FAIR coalitions, Abundant Housing Illinois is endorsing the Protecting Renters Ordinance plus certain changes from the FAIR proposal.

We’re grateful for the viewpoints and leadership the FAIR coalition have brought to this debate. Reasoned dissent makes policy better, and we see this here with what the FAIR folks have brought to the table. Many of the changes we’re recommending are lifted directly from FAIR. We’re grateful for the supply provisions added in FAIR, and look forward to working with Chair Villegas, the Zoning Committee, and City Council on all of these policies and more. We’re especially grateful for the input from the Neighborhood Building Owner’s Alliance; Chicago’s small and midsized housing providers deserve a seat at the table, and we hope further negotiation keeps centering their input along with other interested parties.

PRO maintains existing tenant law protections – something our members say is key to any update of the RLTO. PRO’s placement of most tenant law enforcement in the Department of Housing allows the Department of Building to continue its important focus on permitting new homes and home habitability. PRO’s approach to junk fees was praised by the National Consumer Law Center and is roughly consistent with Evanston and Cook County’s existing approaches, easing compliance for housing providers who work inside and outside of Chicago. PRO also codifies the right to counsel and creates a fully detailed and funded rental registry. Leads of ours have been advocating for a rental registry since 2023! These policies have been successful across many places in increasing housing stability while minimally impacting housing production.

For those concerned that PRO will increase rent – market prices are set by supply. PRO will not increase rent as much as our housing shortage currently does. Where demand is high and prices are high, like in much of Chicago right now, an operations cost increase of no more than $5/unit per month will have minimal bearing on what the rent is.

There are some changes we’d like to see in PRO.

  • The definition of ‘owner occupied’ should include ‘good faith’ owner occupants who have placed their properties in LLCs.
  • PRO should use FAIR’s security deposit cap limits and a more realistic effective date.
  • Allowable fees for prospective tenants should adhere to a ‘reasonable-cost’ standard like in Illinois’ Rental Fee Transparency and Fairness Act.
  • Caps on other fees and fines should be indexed to inflation, to ensure additional costs by housing providers and tenants are born fairly.
  • Rental registry fees should transition to resourcing from the city’s budget, so all of Chicago can share the responsibility of maintaining the registry and not just renters and housing providers; we understand that might be difficult with Chicago’s current budget constraints.

We firmly believe that the best tenant protection a city can provide is having plenty of housing options. Chicago needs to make housing easier and less expensive to build so we can stop being the city with the fastest growing rent in the country. Beyond BUILD, AHIL has model ordinances ready right now for four-flats by right, elimination of minimum lot area requirements, allowing multiple detached houses on a lot, and elimination of parking mandates citywide; any elected official for the City who wants to introduce one should contact us.

Supply work shouldn’t wait. It also isn’t a reason to delay smart policy helping Chicagoans stay where they are. If you want cheaper housing, push BUILD. If you want cheaper housing and tenant rights, push BUILD and vote for an amended PRO.

Warmly,

Abundant Housing Illinois

Update, October 2026: We’ve since published detailed follow-ups on two parts of PRO: what Chicago’s rental registry should collect, and how to pay for it, and how Chicago should regulate rental junk fees.

construction equipment building a soccer stadium, with Roosevelt Road in the foreground

Chicago is about to spend millions on a new parking garage and nothing on transit at The 78

July 10, 2026 / / 0 Comments

This week I asked my alderperson to defer the finance committee’s vote on a massive funding package that would have the city own a parking garage while at the same time making zero investments in transit.

Dear Alderperson Conway,

I think it’s prudent and appropriate if you would, as Finance Committee Vice Chair, to defer voting on the $425 million TIF package for The 78 until several questions and planning issues are resolved. I think you’re the ideal alderperson to insist that a commitment this large has greater scrutiny before it moves and I’m asking you to defer the vote and build consensus on the committee, and gain more support from Chicagoans, to hold it until there’s more analysis and understanding of the pros and cons.

This public commitment deserves more vetting and public engagement than has happened so far and the current timeline will permit. Three concerns stand out.

First, a large share of this package would build an approximately 1,200-space, below-grade garage that the City would own and operate, and I don’t believe public TIF dollars should be underwriting a permanent and expensive parking structure, especially given the city’s track record as a steward of its own parking. In 2006 Chicago leased the garages under Grant and Millennium parks to investors for $563 million over 99 years, a deal that later cost taxpayers roughly $62 million in 2015 1for allowing competing parking and eventually collapsed into default for the investors. Operating parking garages is a risky investment. Before the committee votes, I’d want to understand why a new City-owned garage is a wise use of this money, when it would actually begin generating revenue, and how any proceeds would be directed toward community needs rather than servicing the project or paying back debt used to construct it.

Second, this package includes no transit investment. The original vision for The 78 was anchored by a new CTA Red Line station inside the site, at roughly 15th and Clark, which would ensure that the future residents, tenants, and visitors would not have to rely on cars to get around and add to the local traffic. Public funding to build a new ‘L’ station (approved by City Council in April 2019) would do far more for the city’s climate and equity goals than attracting more driving to the site. Why is the city planning to fund a single-purpose garage while the transit that was supposed to anchor the project is left out?

Third, The 78 has a tenuous plan for its second phase once the soccer stadium is built. The project has long promised thousands of homes in future phases but assurances that residential will be built, and how and when essential infrastructure will be built and funded, are inadequate. The September 2025 presentation2 to Chicago Plan Commission showed the residential area being used as surface car parking for an indefinite period of time. Before the city puts up roughly $425 million, there should be a defined phase-two plan that includes a substantial residential component. The transit-adjacent site is the ideal location for new housing: it would help ease the region’s shortage and give people the option to live near jobs and transit.

I’m asking for your help to get better answers, a better plan, and additional public input, by deferring the vote in Finance. And thank you for the scrutiny you’ve already brought to the city’s finances. 

Respectfully,

Steven Vance

  1. Chicago Sun-Times ↩︎
  2. Chicago Plan Commission ↩︎

A four-story red brick apartment building with ornate white terra cotta diamond and scroll details on the facade, viewed from a corner sidewalk. An elevated train structure is visible behind the building on the left. A large evergreen tree stands to the right, and brick gate pillars with decorative urns flank the building's entrance. Shrubs and an iron fence line the front of the property.

Built in 1912, banned in 1957: the courtyard homes at the Damen station

June 11, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Finding an affordable home near the Brown Line in Ravenswood is hard. Not having enough homes to rent or buy creates cutthroat competition and drives up prices — wait lists for apartments, offers over asking for anyone trying to buy. The retail and day care workers who serve this neighborhood face the same shortage as everyone else: too few homes that meet their needs and budgets, too close to where they need to be.

Half a block from the Damen station there’s a building that shows how local zoning codes can inhibit and prohibit multifamily housing from being built, and how the BUILD plan was designed to start allowing lower-cost housing types again.

Read my previous article about courtyard buildings in Chicago

The building

The courtyard building at 4615-33 N Damen Ave has 45 homes: studios through three-bedrooms, wrapped around a landscaped courtyard, a few hundred feet from rapid transit that connects to jobs across the city. It went up around 1912 (the Cook County Assessors’ Office’s records also say 1914) more than a decade before Chicago adopted its first zoning ordinance. There was no restriction on how many homes could fit on the lot, no required parking, no formula setting a minimum amount of land per apartment required before a permit could be obtained.

(This attached courtyard building is also known in land use and architecture as a point access block because there is a single block of housing with multiple points of access, where each point has a level of two to four apartments sharing a single stair core.)

You could not build this kind of housing on this block today. The law has not allowed it since 1957.

A Sanborn fire insurance map excerpt showing the area around N. Damen Avenue in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood, approximately the 4600 block. The Chicago Rapid Transit Lines Ravenswood Branch elevated rail runs east-west across the upper portion of the map, with a station visible near N. Damen. B
Sanborn map showing the Brown Line station and the courtyard building.

Evolution of Chicago’s housing suppression rules

Each time Chicago has revised its zoning rules, the housing capacity of this lot has shrunk:

  • 1912: 45 homes built. Chicago had no zoning ordinance — no parking requirement, no cap on homes per lot, no minimum-lot-area formula.
  • 1957: The city’s first major zoning rewrite added off-street parking requirements and a minimum-lot-area formula. Maximum allowed on this lot: roughly 33 homes. The parking requirement was just as prohibitive: nowhere on this lot to add it without tearing out apartments to pour concrete.
  • 2026: The current code is stricter still. Maximum allowed: 30 homes — three fewer than the 1957 ban permitted, and 15 fewer than actually exist.

You can see it in the property report on Chicago Cityscape: a building fully occupied for over a century, serving its neighborhood, standing half again as dense as current rules in the B3-2 zoning district would allow on its own footprint.

This is what a ban on affordable home choices looks like in practice. The courtyard building style didn’t fall out of fashion. People still choose to live in them. The bans on building new ones were written in 1957 and have only tightened since.

What the BUILD plan would do

The BUILD plan is relevant to this specific address. The plan’s provisions don’t simply gesture at more homes. They name the specific home types that municipalities would be required to allow, and courtyard apartments are on the list. The kind of homes here, in the kind of community that needs more home choices near transit, is the kind of flexibility for responding to housing needs that the bill specifically restores.

Pair that with the BUILD plan’s investment to actually finance construction, and you have a path to more homes — near the jobs, the schools, and the transit that the people our communities rely on need to reach.

Illinois already knows how to build this housing. It’s standing half a block from the Brown Line, a century old and against the rules. Pass the BUILD plan.